The Duchess War (Brothers Sinister #1)(81)

He gave her a little smile. “Frauds need a helping hand as much as anyone else. I know all about that.” He glanced toward the street where the boy had vanished. “Especially when it’s done like that.”

“You know about telling lies for money?” Minnie felt a smile come over her. She stood, brushed the crumbs off her gown, and strode over to him.

“Indeed. Some of my first memories are about lying for money.” He tucked her hand into the crook of his arm and they began to walk. On the left, a wrought iron rail separated their path from the Seine. The river drifted by. Minnie refused to believe its waters could be brown and dingy.

“Really?” She huffed in disbelief. “What trinket did you want to buy?”

“No trinkets.” He flashed her a smile and patted her arm. “It’s rather an amusing story. You see, my parents married under…odd circumstances. My father convinced my mother he loved her. She believed him; my father could be most convincing when he put his mind to it. But her father knew a bit more of the world, and he suspected that dukes didn’t fall into passionate, life-altering love with wool-merchants’ daughters who had enormous dowries. Not on a few weeks’ acquaintance, at any rate. So instead of handing over a vast sum of money to my father upon their marriage, he put it all in trust, to be paid out so long as my mother was happy.”

Robert had retrieved an extra bag from the baker. He opened it now and passed her a bun—crisp and golden and warm—and took out one for himself. This he began to apportion into pieces, tossing them over the iron rail for the ducks.

“This does not sound like the beginning to an amusing story,” Minnie said dubiously.

“Well, the background information isn’t very funny, I suppose.” Robert frowned and broke off a piece of crust. “But the rest of it is, I promise. In any event, to summarize: my father hadn’t any real money of his own, and my mother controlled the rest. So when she came to visit—”

“Your mother would visit? Was she not living with you?”

“No, most of the time she was not. I don’t think I saw her for the first three years of my life.” He scratched his chin. “If she’d been living with my father, the trust would have paid out—those were the terms. My mother controlled the money by her presence. She didn’t want my father to get a penny, and so when he told her that she would have to live with him in order to see me, she told him to go to hell.”

Minnie thought back over her conversations with his mother. She’d said all sorts of things, but not this. It explained a great deal, though. Far too much, in fact. This was not turning out to be anything like an amusing story. Minnie blinked at her husband, but he had a little smile on his face, as if this were all part of some joke. He tossed bread blithely in the air and grinned when the ducks squabbled for it.

“So, in any event—”

“Wait just one moment. Your father didn’t let your mother see you for the first three years of your life?”

“Correct.” He frowned and broke off another bit of crust from his bun. “He didn’t have any control over the money under the terms of the trust, but legally he did control me. So…” He shrugged again, as if this were perfectly normal. “One can’t blame him for trying.”

One couldn’t? Minnie could.

But Robert simply threw bread into the water and kept talking.

“By the time I was four,” he continued, “they’d worked out an arrangement. My mother’s father gave a handful of factories to my father so he could keep his worst creditors at bay.” He glanced at Minnie. “Graydon Boots was one of those. In return, my mother was allowed to see me for a few days twice a year. I would desperately try to be good when she came—so good that this time, she wouldn’t leave. My father, naturally, supported me in these endeavors. When I was six years old, his brilliant plan was this: I would pretend that I couldn’t read, presumably because in my father’s straitened circumstances, he could not afford a tutor. He was sure that would break her down.”

Minnie cleared her throat, which seemed strangely tight. “Did it?”

“Almost. I played the most pitiful urchin ever. I pretended not to know my letters. I stared blankly at pages and shrugged. I started to recite my alphabet, but skipped letters L through P. I counted to one hundred for her and transposed the sixties with the seventies. I added five and six and came up with thirteen.” He grinned at her. “And my father was right—it almost worked. After a few days, she dashed off a letter to her father, ordering him to send another trunk with her things. She ordered a primer from a local shop. And every afternoon, she would take me in her parlor, and she’d sit me down and we would go through the alphabet. She was very severe about it—regimented, even. We were on a strict schedule.”

“You did…” She couldn’t contemplate a duke’s son not knowing how to read at that age, but then, she couldn’t contemplate a duke growing up and never seeing his mother, either. “You did already know your letters, didn’t you?”

He gave her a nonchalant shrug. “Naturally. There wasn’t much else for me to do besides read. After three days of pretending ignorance, I was already chafing at the bit, wondering when I could get back to finishing Robinson Crusoe. But it was working—she hadn’t left yet. When we got to M-is-for-Mouse, I changed it to M-is-for-Mama. She gave me this look—this stern look with her lips pressed together—and demanded to know why I’d said that. I told her it was because I didn’t want any mice about, but I liked having her there.”